Web Work So Far

Over the weekend, I was able to find a couple opportunities for web design and maintenance locally, so that was just awesome. I was also able to start working on ClientX's first website today, and although I got off to a rough start, I quickly got my bearings with the ancient art of PHP and Smarty templates, and got through 3/4 of their requests for the week. That was just my first day working on it too, so you could say that I had a rather productive day. One thing I do to help my productivity while I'm working from home is to set a single tone reminder to go off every 30 minutes. As I'm working, I will let it go through one or two dings before I get up and take a break for a bit. This also helps me stay on task when I'm away from my work, reminding me that I have to get back to it soon.

With this client, I am dropping a whole lot of hints to move towards a better CMS, instead of the custom made one they are using. I can imagine that they have spent thousands of dollars in the past per update because each time they want to add a new function, they have to hire a coder to code that function. Why? There is a whole world of components for systems like Joomla out there that are cheap to implement. That would save the client thousands of dollars over the next few years. Heck! They could even do most of this work themselves if they went that route.

 Another thing I'm kind of liking about this job, is that my contract reserves me the rights to blog my work, and even gives me the rights to all of my code too. This way I can share it if I want to. If I ever figure out how to implement a drop-down menu into this ancient system, I do plan on sharing the menu-box.tpl file. It's been a tough one so far, so I can't be the only one looking for a solution.

 That's about it for today. Things are moving, just have to wait for the road to go up the hill :)